Merry Xmas! An Illustrated History

It’s Christmas!! I’m sitting here in my Fairisle knit jumper with reindeer and snowflakes on, I’m listening to Idina Menzel forcefully emote glorious Christmas music at me, and I still haven’t bought all my presents or finished putting the decorations up. The festive season is definitely upon us.

All of that is slightly beside the point for the purposes of this blog post, but damnit, I just really love Xmas.

Oh wait, sorry – not Xmas, Christmas.

This is a common complaint at this time of year and gets people really riled up. A quick poll of my small corner of Twitter (disclaimer: I did this last year and was so slow to write the post that I saved it for this year) shows that pretty much everyone prefers to write Christmas over Xmas. For some, it’s a matter of principle, that they don’t like shortening or abbreviating words, or because Christmas is more proper and more traditional. For others, it can be seen as ‘taking the Christ out of Christmas’, which is obviously something bad if you’re religious, but might be preferable for secular writers.

Of course, I’m not here to tell you whether you should be offended by something or not, but I think opinions about this are interesting considering the history of Xmas.

Xmas is no less full of Christ than Christmas in any way but spelling. Any quick Google will tell you this, but I’m going to put it here. With pictures. Lots of pictures. But the point stands; writing Xmas is not taking the Christ out of Christmas. And it’s certainly not any less traditional.

The ‘X’ in Xmas comes from the Greek spelling of Christ, ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ. The first character, the X, is called Chi (pronounced ‘kai’, to rhyme with ‘high’). It had been used by pagan Greek scribes to mark notable or good things in the margins of texts, but in the 4th century it merged with the Rho to become a symbol.

The Chi-Rho

The Emperor Constantine adopted it, went into battle under it and won, and it took off. All of a sudden this symbol had power across the Christian world. Indeed, the Christian cross as we know it didn’t start to appear in art produced in the British Isles until the sixth century. The Chi-Rho was the go-to symbol, and is still used today.

Charles Thomas, in his Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500, has two excellent illustrations showing its development and use in different contexts:

Most people were not literate in their own language, let alone in Latin or Greek and it’s very unlikely they recognised letters in the symbol. To most of the western Christian world, this symbol was Christ. The Chi-Rho was already in use in Roman Britain, and it comes into use again by the Anglo-Saxons from the fifth century. As I’ve written about elsewhere, scribes love abbreviating, and they really love symbolism, and XP combines those two in one heady mixture. XP is what we call a nomen sacrum, a sacred name, in which the symbol itself has power. In such cases, the abbreviation is not used to save space or effort, but because that form has more power than the full words. It was ‘not really devised to lighten the labours of the scribe, but rather to shroud in reverent obscurity the holiest words of the Christian religion’.*

And oh wow in so many more places. See if you can spot it on each of these pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.

Of course, as we know, Christ is not just a stand-alone word, it also appears within other words (Christmas being the relevant example here). In 1485, for example, it’s used in christened:

1485 Rolls of Parliament. Any Kyng or Prynce in England Xp̄enned.

And in 1573, in Christopher:

1573 J. Baret Aluearie, The long mistaking of this woorde Xp̃s, standing for Chrs by abbreuation which for lacke of knowledge in the greeke they tooke for x, p, and s, and so like~wise Xp̃ofer.

And eventually, just the X is used as a short-hand for the whole thing, as more obscurity slips in. The OED cites the first use of X in Christmas in 1551 by which time I imagine it’s long lost its symbolic power, particularly as, as the previous example shows, even in the sixteenth century, people were confusing the Greek letters Chi and Rho for the Latin letters Ex and Pee:

And on Victorian Xmas cards – none of which I’m able to post here for reasonable copyright reasons but which you should look at because they’re lovely – in the 1860s and 1870s.

So, not only is X- old as balls, in the medieval period it was even more powerful than Christ-. Feel free to use it for space-saving, festive, jolly, and religious reasons. And Merry Xmas!

[Note: What does surprise me – and if anyone can answer this, I’d be interested – is how low Xmas is compared to Christmas on Google NGrams. Possibly because it only contains published books, where Xmas might be rarer?]

65 responses to “Merry Xmas! An Illustrated History”

Ha! Memories! One of the minor disconnects from my childhood is that my Lutheran pastor father didn’t care for “Xmas” for exactly the reason stated — it supposedly removed “Christ” from “Christmas” — but even in high school I knew about “X” standing for Christ. The disconnect was that my dad didn’t. (But then he also surprised me in never having heard of the word “ubiquitous” either.)

Reblogged this on NavasolaNature and commented:
Not quite my usual focus but having studied linguistics and the origins of words this is an interesting snippet for Christmas time. When words were truly sacred. Wishing everyone peace and joy over this Christmas time and for 2015.

Symbols like the ChiRho, the cross and the fish, etc…are important to the evangelizing of the gospel, in that they can be easily remembered and recognized among peoples of varying languages. The beauty of the Word is that we can ever learn more about God.

Reblogged this on Oak Tree and Stars and commented:
I really had no idea that Xmas was just as religious as writing Christmas. This article has opened my eyes. Thank you. And what I lovely history lesson too.

Well done! I published a similar themed article in a local publication where I pointed out that many of the people who get offended by “Xmass” also have that plasti-chrome Xtian fish on the back of their car. I asked them what they thought the X in that fish stood for. (…and yes, I think we should refer to them as Xtians just to hone the point.

cool illustrations…a bit of an eye opener too…I will be borrowing this on occasion to show my point if that’s ok. I will of course give the credit where due for all the “leg work” Thank you by the way. and Merry Xmas??

Christmas can be celebrated in many ways. The separation from the religious to the celebrative aspect of it depends on the individual. For the children it is the marvel of lights, activity and presents. Religiously it is celebrated differently in every country indifferent ways. So! who is to say any of them are wrong.

Thank you. This has been riling me for years. We learned this in 6th grade. Granted I went to a Catholic school (that didn’t teach latin) so it should come as no surprise that we learned it. But decades later so many of my friends of an age are outraged at the taking Christ out of Christmas. And to top it off, being a letters geek, I immediately used X, P as a letter form itself for Christmas because I am a calligraphy and font geek. Guess who the first person to object to the usage was….
The teacher who taught the religion class. Oy!

"Oh no, sir. It can be narrower reading. Mr Hector says if we know one book off by heart, it doesn’t matter if it’s really crap. The Prayer Book, sir. The Mikado, the Pigeon Fancier’s Gazette … So long as it’s words, sir. Words and worlds."
-- Alan Bennett, The History Boys